Conventional wisdom suggests it will be difficult for Ron DeSantis to close his monumentally lopsided polling gap to Donald Trump without throwing some punches, and taking a few in return. The delta between the two candidates is particularly pronounced at the national level, where the former president leads by around 30 points, depending on how the average of the polls are weighted. But the difference isn’t quite as daunting in early primary states, where DeSantis is 18 or so points behind in Iowa, for example, and 21 points behind in New Hampshire. If the Florida governor’s plan is to win one or two of those contests, in order to slingshot his momentum into an unstoppable force, DeSantis will need a message that resonates not just at the national level but, critically, at the state level as well. 

So far, the DeSantis campaign’s national strategy appears to coalesce around a word cloud of culture war talking points meant to galvanize the far right: cultural Marxism, corporate wokeism, D.E.I. madness, L.G.B.T. overreach, and so forth. In a Churchill-inspired campaign speech about the “woke mind virus” last week, DeSantis used the word “woke” so many times that it became a punchline in the media and on the left. (Trump himself seemed to take a crack at DeSantis for his overuse of the term, saying: “I don’t like the term ‘woke,’ because I hear ‘woke, woke, woke…’ It’s just a term they use. Half the people can’t even define it. They don’t know what it is.” Indeed.)

But at the state level, DeSantis appears to be leaning into messaging that does draw real distinctions with the former president—and, yes, occasionally takes a tentative swing or two. The DeSantis campaign is now directly attacking Trump for his approach to Covid: his waffling and inconsistency on public health measures; initial support for travel bans and other pandemic mandates; wavering but continual support for Dr. Anthony Fauci; and, most remarkably, his advocacy and promotion of life-saving vaccines. “The way they weaponized these Covid vaxes was a massive incursion into our freedoms,” DeSantis said at one recent event. “We can never allow ‘Warp Speed’ to trump informed consent in this country ever again.”